No, not so. At least, I see no reason to assume so.
Why the hell does someone who has a flexation of 14 degrees deserve to keep bowling while one who has one of 16 degrees must be instantly banned and labelled a cheat? There is ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE between 14 and 16, so far as gaining an advantage is concerned. It's utterly stupid for a law to suggest that there can possibly be any threshold. Once you go over 0 degrees, you can never make a fair law.
This is before we even get into the fact that someone can quite easily bend their elbow 10 degrees in testing, and 20 in match situations. Absolutely no way can anyone spot a difference of 10 degrees - it's totally impossible.

So your saying there should be no tolerance for bowlers who bowl with even a slightly bent arm?

It's going to be fun seeing the bowler try to field with an arm-brace on - and what happens if he drops the ball in his run-up? Does he have to get a fielder to pick it up for him?

Or do we develop a magical, 'inertia' arm-brace that allows for a normal range of movement, seam-picking, shoelace tying and botty-wiping but then leaps into position, car seat-belt-wise, during the delivery stride? If so, who controls it? I suppose it will give the umpire something to do when he's not just making wrong decisions?

Every bowler would need their own arm-brace, of course - that means that if you have (typically) 6 bowlers in your side, then that's 6 arm-braces you'll need on the field of play at the same time - put the others in a pile behind the wicket-keeper, I suppose?

That means that if Harmison ever bowls well again, someone would say "He must have put Flintoff's arm-guard on by mistake".

Another impractical, hare-brained, ridiculous, totally silly idea.

I wonder whose it was?

I think the problem is quite obviously solved here by making the brace into a cannon type object that simply fires the ball at the batsman, possibly at a speed decided on by the pace of the bowler's run up. It solves the problem of strain on the shoulders...and you could get another fielder to stand next to him making a 'bowling' motion ala a ball machine to allow the batsman sight of when the ball is being delivered.

As for the conundrum with the leftover arm braces, you could make another fielder out of them and stand it at square leg hoping it would either miraculously take a catch or stop a ball somehow...we'd call it 'Phil Tufnell'.

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Perhaps carefully positioned snipers with protractors to measure degrees of flex could simply blast people's arms off if they judge they are chucking it. Less costly than arm braces and slightly more sensible.

I think the problem is quite obviously solved here by making the brace into a cannon type object that simply fires the ball at the batsman, possibly at a speed decided on by the pace of the bowler's run up. It solves the problem of strain on the shoulders...and you could get another fielder to stand next to him making a 'bowling' motion ala a ball machine to allow the batsman sight of when the ball is being delivered.

As for the conundrum with the leftover arm braces, you could make another fielder out of them and stand it at square leg hoping it would either miraculously take a catch or stop a ball somehow...we'd call it 'Phil Tufnell'.

NEW DELHI: Bowlers are getting away with illegal actions because umpires are afraid of calling them for political reasons, according to West Indian fast bowling great Michael Holding.

Holding, whose copybook, but lethal, bowling action earned him the nickname of Whispering Death, said it was not difficult to identify chuckers with the naked eye.

"Once you see something with the naked eye, you should be reporting it and having it assessed and measured properly," Holding said in an interview. "The difficulty is in the politics surrounding it, with people afraid to report certain players," he added.

Holding, now a respected television commentator at 52, hinted the Pakistani tearaway Shoaib Akhtar still does not have a clean action despite being cleared to bowl by the International Cricket Council (ICC).

"When you look at Shoaib Akhtar and (India’s) Rudra Pratap Singh from the front, you see a bent arm with one and a straight arm with the other," he said. "Politics is preventing people from doing what they should," he explained.

Holding added that the way out was "to get people in authority, which have the backbone to do what is right, and not what is politically expedient."

Holding, who claimed 249 wickets from 60 Tests in the 1970s and 1980s, said excessive workload was to blame for the steady decline of quality fast bowlers. "Its the workload," he said. "I wouldn’t have coped. I wouldn’t have been able to play 12 years of Test cricket. It’s ridiculous how much they’re playing," he added.

The West Indian great said the use of helmets and protective gear had made it easier for batsmen the to face fast bowling these days. "In our time we didn’t have a lot of protection, so you would easily find out who didn’t have the guts to stand up and face the fire. A lot of batsmen today, their technique is so faulty that if they were to have that 30 years ago, they’d be dead. They now take their eyes off the ball knowing that even if it hits them on the head, the helmet will protect them," he said.

Asked which current batsmen faced fast bowling well, Holding said: "I would say Ricky Ponting, Sachin Tendulkar up to three years ago but not now. And England captain Michael Vaughan. Rahul Dravid, to a certain degree and Venkatsai Laxman too."

Holding rated Australian Dennis Lillee and Pakistan’s Imran Khan as the best fast bowlers of his time. "They had pace and they could do things with the ball," he said. "Dennis was pretty much the all-round fast bowler; he could do anything with the ball. Imran was another who could intimidate people out with his pace and also get them with movement, especially into the right-hander," he added.

It's going to be fun seeing the bowler try to field with an arm-brace on - and what happens if he drops the ball in his run-up? Does he have to get a fielder to pick it up for him?

Or do we develop a magical, 'inertia' arm-brace that allows for a normal range of movement, seam-picking, shoelace tying and botty-wiping but then leaps into position, car seat-belt-wise, during the delivery stride? If so, who controls it? I suppose it will give the umpire something to do when he's not just making wrong decisions?

Every bowler would need their own arm-brace, of course - that means that if you have (typically) 6 bowlers in your side, then that's 6 arm-braces you'll need on the field of play at the same time - put the others in a pile behind the wicket-keeper, I suppose?

Err, since when would bowlers all need their own braces? Most standardised designs would fit most bowlers. Clearly, there would be exceptions for exceptional elbows.
Since when, either, would an arm-brace debar someone from bending down and picking up a ball they'd dropped? Equally, when would it really cause problems for fielding off the own bowling?
And when would that matter, if it made all bowling infinately fairer?

Another thing - how is the bowler supposed to field off his own bowling? And how long will it be before in trying to do so, a bowler is struck by a ball he might otherwise have been able to field, or dives instinctively or falls, and ends up with a career-threatening injury?

That's the only problem. And the only one. It's something I wondered about.
But I still doubt it'd be much of a problem.

NEW DELHI: Bowlers are getting away with illegal actions because umpires are afraid of calling them for political reasons, according to West Indian fast bowling great Michael Holding.

Holding, whose copybook, but lethal, bowling action earned him the nickname of Whispering Death, said it was not difficult to identify chuckers with the naked eye.

"Once you see something with the naked eye, you should be reporting it and having it assessed and measured properly," Holding said in an interview. "The difficulty is in the politics surrounding it, with people afraid to report certain players," he added.

Holding, now a respected television commentator at 52, hinted the Pakistani tearaway Shoaib Akhtar still does not have a clean action despite being cleared to bowl by the International Cricket Council (ICC).

"When you look at Shoaib Akhtar and (India’s) Rudra Pratap Singh from the front, you see a bent arm with one and a straight arm with the other," he said. "Politics is preventing people from doing what they should," he explained.

Holding added that the way out was "to get people in authority, which have the backbone to do what is right, and not what is politically expedient."

Holding, who claimed 249 wickets from 60 Tests in the 1970s and 1980s, said excessive workload was to blame for the steady decline of quality fast bowlers. "Its the workload," he said. "I wouldn’t have coped. I wouldn’t have been able to play 12 years of Test cricket. It’s ridiculous how much they’re playing," he added.

The West Indian great said the use of helmets and protective gear had made it easier for batsmen the to face fast bowling these days. "In our time we didn’t have a lot of protection, so you would easily find out who didn’t have the guts to stand up and face the fire. A lot of batsmen today, their technique is so faulty that if they were to have that 30 years ago, they’d be dead. They now take their eyes off the ball knowing that even if it hits them on the head, the helmet will protect them," he said.

Asked which current batsmen faced fast bowling well, Holding said: "I would say Ricky Ponting, Sachin Tendulkar up to three years ago but not now. And England captain Michael Vaughan. Rahul Dravid, to a certain degree and Venkatsai Laxman too."

Holding rated Australian Dennis Lillee and Pakistan’s Imran Khan as the best fast bowlers of his time. "They had pace and they could do things with the ball," he said. "Dennis was pretty much the all-round fast bowler; he could do anything with the ball. Imran was another who could intimidate people out with his pace and also get them with movement, especially into the right-hander," he added.

I generally like Michael Holding but I always find former cricketers' views on why protective equipment is bad utterly ludicrous.

If you tolerate it, you place an impossible question on the table.
Where to stop?
And how do you justify stopping at X degrees rather than Y degrees?

That's not an immpossible question, 15 degrees is the amount.

All fast bowlers bend their arms on delivery, wearing a brace would mean the only way they would be able to bowl fast would be to damage their elbows, meaning even more bowlers would get injured or have to bowl at a lesser speed, which would make the game totaly batsman dominated, which isn't what we want.

Your logic is also flawed, you say there is no difference between 14 and 16 degrees. There is a difference of 2 degrees.

You say there IS a difference between 0 and 1, a difference of 1 degree, which happens to be less than 2.